Hypocrisy – End of Disclosure (Nuclear Blast)

Monday, 29th April 2013 By David E. Gehlke

Rating: 7/10

Peter Tagtgren doesn’t strike as someone concerned with record sales and/or scene stature, but it sure sounds like it on End of Disclosure, Hypocrisy’s 12th studio album. Granted, the Swedes have firmly been entrenched in their own universe of atmospheric, occasionally brutal, normally melodic death metal since 1994, yet End of Disclosure feels like a virtual re-write of some of the band’s previous efforts. It’s like this album and 2009’s excellent A Taste of Extreme Divinity are interchangeable; they’re essentially Tagtgren taking the band down the same road as before. This time, the results are hardly inspiring.

Figures, Tagtgren admitted the approach of End of Disclosure was to get “back to basics,” and yeah, it’s definitely looking like that. The title track is a composite of “Roswell 47,” with only tales of aliens missing. “Tales of Thy Spineless” culls from the band’s brutal side, but the riff tangents are awfully The Final Chapter-sounding. Melodic cuts like “The Eye” (probably the best song here) and “Soldier of Fortune” display a rather normalized, safe melodic angle, while the predicable epic album closer “The Return” was telegraphed from the start.

Hypocrisy has long held the potential to be an AC/DC or Motorhead-type in death metal circles. They’ve been building off the same template for nearly two decades now, usually with great success (see: Abducted, The Final Chapter, the wholly-underrated self-titled album, and Taste of Extreme Divinity), yet End of Disclosure is the first album that sounds contrived. It shouldn’t take four years to pop out an album like this…End of Disclosure simply sounds like a bunch of b-sides from its predecessor.